Yun YAN
Postdoctoral Fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolYun YAN is a computational biologist and software-focused postdoctoral fellow with 13 years of experience applying single-cell multi-omics and spatial transcriptomics to dissect genotype-phenotype relationships in cancer. Based at MD Anderson Cancer Center, she develops and refactors scientific software (notably contributions to the velocyto.R RNA velocity tool) while integrating single-cell DNA, RNA and ATAC co-assays to study tumor evolution. Her background blends wet-lab internships and extensive computational roles at NYU and MSK, giving her fluency across experimental design, data processing, and algorithm development. She mentors trainees and collaborates across genetics, pulmonary medicine, and computational biology teams to translate complex genomic signals into biological insight. Fluent in R and Python and experienced with HDF5/loom formats, she emphasizes reproducible, production-ready code alongside novel methods. Her guiding philosophy—“be creative, not competitive”—drives a focus on innovation that advances both tools and biological understanding.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Master of Science - MS, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Wuhan UniversityMaster of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at NYU Tandon School of EngineeringComputational Biology, Computational Biology at Rutgers University - CamdenDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computational Biology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computational Biology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences
Stackoverflow
2,457reputation
408kreached
12answers
10questions
Github Skills (13)
r10
hdf9
bioinformatics8
algorithm7
algorithms7
inkscape6
pandas6
summarize6
groupby6
ggplot6
plot6
python6
image-processing6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
velocyto-team/velocyto.R
Jan 2018 - Oct 2018
RNA velocity estimation in R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 2 PRs, 8 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Yun primarily focused on refactoring and improving the `velocyto.r` repository, an RNA velocity estimation tool. Their contributions included removing trailing spaces, adding plotting functions for filtering genes, and updating the code to support different file formats (loom files via both `hdf5r` and `h5`). The user made further modifications to the core function `gene.relative.velocity.estimates`, indicating involvement in the software's central algorithm.
rna-velocity-estimationrna-velocityestimationvelocityrna
Puriney/MrY
Sep 2017 - Aug 2019
Contributions:2 PRs, 19 pushes, 1 comment in 1 year 11 months
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